Hegel, in his ‘Philosophy of History,’ has recorded a judgment of Machiavelli’s treatise in relation to the political conditions of Italy at the end of the mediaeval period, which might be quoted as the most complete apology for the author it is possible to make.  ‘This book,’ he says, ’has often been cast aside with horror as containing maxims of the most revolting tyranny; yet it was Machiavelli’s high sense of the necessity of constituting a state which caused him to lay down the principles on which alone states could be formed under the circumstances.  The isolated lords and lordships had to be entirely suppressed; and though our idea of Freedom is incompatible with the means which he proposes both as the only available and also as wholly justifiable—­including, as these do, the most reckless violence, all kinds of deception, murder, and the like—­yet we must confess that the despots who had to be subdued were assailable in no other way, inasmuch as indomitable lawlessness and perfect depravity were thoroughly engrained in them.’

Yet after the book has been shut and the apology has been weighed, we cannot but pause and ask ourselves this question, Which was the truer patriot—­Machiavelli, systematizing the political vices and corruptions of his time in a philosophical essay, and calling on the despot to whom it was dedicated to liberate Italy; or Savonarola, denouncing sin and enforcing repentance—­Machiavelli, who taught as precepts of pure wisdom those very principles of public immorality which lay at the root of Italy’s disunion and weakness; or Savonarola, who insisted that without a moral reformation no liberty was possible?  We shall have to consider the action of Savonarola in another place.  Meanwhile, it is not too much to affirm that, with diplomatists like Machiavelli, and with princes like those whom he has idealized, Italy could not be free.  Hypocrisy, treachery, dissimulation, cruelty are the vices of the selfish and the enslaved.  Yet Machiavelli was led by his study of the past and by his experience of the present to defend these vices, as the necessary qualities of the prince whom he would fain have chosen for the saviour of his country.  It is legitimate to excuse him on the ground that the Italians of his age had not conceived a philosophy of right which should include duties as well as privileges, and which should guard the interests of the governed no less than those of the governor.  It is true that the feudal conception of Monarchy, so well apprehended by him in the fourth chapter of the Principe, had nowhere been realized in Italy, and that therefore the right solution of the political problem seemed to lie in setting force against force, and fraud against fraud, for a sublime purpose.  It may also be urged with justice that the historians and speculators of antiquity, esteemed beyond their value by the students of the sixteenth century, confirmed him in his application of a positive philosophy to statecraft.  The success which attended